DEVELOPING COMMUNITY
LEADERSHIP
ELLA JAKER
fV> Ella Baker, a veteran of five decades of work in
tl1c freedom movement, is one of the foremost organizers
of our time. A woman of dynamic strcngt/1, quiet persistence
and great conviction, she works out of the limelight, providing
the essential skill and experience which sustain dynamic
mass movements.
Born in Norfolk, Virginia, she grew up in a small town in
North Carolina, and received her formal education, through
tile eollt'l:C lt·\ld, ill I IIIII· .~ lute . Uptlll l:;l'llduuliou fi'OIII SIIIIW
Uuivcrsity in Halcigh, she came to New York just before I he
DcpressioJJo! 1929 . .IJJ the 193o's ~ l1 c irleJJtified with 11wve·
ll}ents in the area of workers' education, consumer
cooperatives, consumer protection and community organizing.
Early in tl1e 194o's she 1)egan to work with tl1e NAACP
II .~ 1111 n., si.\ lunt firlrl srnc:lnry. T.:tkr .d w IICT:IIrl!' lire n:rliou:rl
director of bwnches of the NAACP. As Prcsidcut of tl1e
New York Brnnch NAA C P, site ltclpccl to iuitiatc com·
f
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34G
IN GOVEIINMI.!:N'l' SERVICE AND 1'0
..
U IJCAL LIFE
t de facto segregation in the New York
s.
PI:t~;~~7s~~liolnagains
00
CI~~~:i~~i~:a~~:s~:; 6:~: of work with
the Southern
adviso~ an~ active particip=~~n~; {%~~~~:~~ was ~ ~ounder,
Coordmatmg Committee (SNCC) tl
h . No? Vl.olent
1964, Miss Baker helped to found the Jro~g. ~ts .lifctJme. In
Democratic Party (MFDP)
MISSISsippi Fre~dom
its f d.
.
, gave tlJe keynote address at
oun mg conventwn d h 1 d
. . ·
at~ p e pe . .orgamze Its challeiJge
to the National De
mocra JC arty m Atlantic ·c ·ty
1
and
new MISS Baker at a cruci·ll . .
.
ause JCY
Among tl
M
' pomt m tlJcir development
gomery b~~s;r~~~st i~·~ Rosa Parks, who started the Mont~
with Miss Baker in the j.J~A~~ ~h~Jong before that worked
who Jed SNCC th
h .
1
abama; James Forman
Carmichael· H R ro~g Its most crucial years; Stokely
,
white.
, . ap rown; and many more, both black and
k'~o~;~~t~~}lo~;e;0~1:~:i~%~;~1 ::a~v~~;~~~j;:r~;~s~c: ~~ ;n~f
Miss Baker now serves as a consultant to
groups in both the South and
~ue~::~f:~s
.
0 ~~ru;~t:r0~f
~y~~{ ork~.anizational ~or~, I have never thought in terms of
rna mg a contnbubon " I ·
1
functioning where there was. a n JUSt t 10u?ht of myself as
contribution I think it may be th~~dj ~~~~d If I ~ave made a
, some mfluencc on
a large n.um bcr of people.
As ass!Shl n t field secret·
f I I
much of m
.
"~Yo t le >ranches of the NAACP,
wal'tl:~~:d~:~ 1 11;11 !1~~Jt;i~lut~d
At that. time the
NAACP
I remember w.hcn NAACP
1 g . g~ of SOCial change.
th~ b:~sis for getting beaten ~~~~;: ~~~~~~~l~ 1~:1.thc South was
used to leave New York nbout the l ·11
lr:ivd lhrnll/llt lilt• SOIIII ( . r
51 of £i'cb111.1fY :mel
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I Ill I 1111' In li I'C II II
II
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II
go lo, Sil )', llirndllg h :llll Alahallla ani! ·I I J ll IS. . WOII <
< IC P o or ':l n1ze lll <:'lll ·
11
11
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IN GOVERNMENT SEitVWI' ANO l'OLI'I'lCAI. l.Jio'~:
bcrship campaigns. And in the process of helping to organi:te
membership campaigns, there was opportunity for develop·
ing community reaction. You ·would go into areas where
people were not yet organized in the NAACP and try to get
them more involved. Maybe you would start with some
simple thing like the fact that they had no street lights, or
the fact that in the given area somebody had been arrested
or had been jailed in a 11\anner that was considered i11egal
and unfair, and the like. You would deal with whatever the
local problem was, and on the basis of the needs of the
people you would try to organize them in the NAACP.
Black people who were living in the South were constantly
living with violence. Part of the job was to help them to
understand what that violence was and how they in an
organized fashion could help to stem it. The major job was
getting people to understand that they had something within
their power that they could use, and it could only be used if
they understood what was happening and how group action
could counter violence even when it was perpetrated by the
police or, in some instances, the state. My basic sense of it
has always been to get people to understand that in the long
run they themselves are the only protection they have against
violence or injustice. If they only had ten members in the
NAACP at a given point, those ten members could be in
touch with twenty-five members in the -next little town, with
fifty in the next and throughout the state as a result of the
organization of state conferences, and they, of course, could
be linked up with the national. People have to be made to
understand that they cannot look for salvation anywhere but
to themselves.
I left the NAACP and then worked at fund ·mising with
the National Urban League Service Fund and with several
national health organizations. However, I continued my work
with the NAACP on the local level. I became the advisor for
the Youth Council. Then I served as President· of the New
York hl'llnd1 ttl 11 poinl. wh ci'C il l111d s1111k In 11 low kvrl in
membership and otherwise. And in the process uf sc.: rvin g as
I
348
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IN GOVERNMENT SERVICE AND POLITICAL LIFE
President we tried to bring tl1c NAACP bnck, us I culhl il,
,.
to the people. We moved the branch out of an office buildit1g
1111d lornl cd it wl~t 'JT it wo11ld l•c IIIOI C vi~ihlc to tlu: .lludclll
comtllunity. We started dcvc'loping an active branch. It became one of the largest branches. I was President for a couple
.of years. It was strictly volunteer work which lasted until
four o'clock in the morning, sometimes.
Whcu tl1c •95·1S11prcn1c Court decision 011 scllool tlcsegrc·
gation came, I was serving as chairman of the Educational
Cn111111ith.:c of th e Nt.:w York hr:111<:1!. We hcg:1n to deal with
the problems of de facto segregation, and the results of the
de facto segregation which were evidenced largely in the
achievement levels of black children, going down instead of
going up after they entered public school. We had calJed the
first committee meeting and Kenneth Clark became the
chairman of that committee. During th at period, I served on
the Mayor's Commission on School Integration, with the
subdivision on zoning. In the summer of !957, I gave time
to organizing what we called Parents in Action for Quality
Education.
I've never believed that the people who control . things
really were willing arid able to pay the price of integration.
From a practical standpoint, anyone who looked at the
Harlem area knew that the potential for integration per se
was basically impossible unless there were some radically
innovative things done. And those innovative things would
not be acceptable to those who ran the school system, nor
to communities, nor even to the people who call themselves
supporters of integration. I did a good deal of speaking, and
I \vent to Queens, I went to the upper West side, and the
people very eagerly said they wanted school integration. But
when you raised the question of whether they would permit
or would welcome Blacks to live in the same houses with
them, which was the only practical way at that stage to
achieve integration, they squirmed. Integration certainly had
to be pushed concurrently with changing the quality of edu·
cation that the black children were getting, and ~hanging
349~,
IN GOVERNMENT SERVICE AND POLITICAl,
Lin:
the attitudes of the educat:ioual establishment toward the
black COlllllHinity.
[ duu't Lhiuk we: acldt.:vcd l'uo IIIllCh with the cutlllllitl'ct
except to pinpoint certain issues and to have survived some
very sharp confrontations with the Superintendent and others
on the board of Education. But out of it came increased fervor
on the part of the bbck communities to make some cl1nngcs.
Ouc of the gr:Jtifying things to tne is the fact tlt:1t even as
bte as this ye:~r I have met people who were in tltat gro11p
and wl1u l1avc bet.:ll coulinuuusly activ!.! iu the struggle.: for
quality education in the black communities ever since.
There certainly has been progress in the direction of the
capacity of people to face this issue. And to me, when people
themselves know what they are looking for and recognize that
tltey can exercise some influence by action, that's progress.
Come 1957, I went down South a couple of times in connection with the formation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. At the end of '57 there was the need for
someone to go down to set up the office of SCLC in Atlanta
and to coordinate what it considered its first South-wide
project, which was the holding of simultaneous meetings on
February 12th in twenty different cities. I went down with
the idea of not spending more than six weeks there, giving
myself a month to get the thing going, and then two weeks
to clean it up. ' I stayed with SCLC for two and a half years,
because they didn't have anybody. My official capacity was
varied. When I first went down, I didn't insist on a title, ·
which is nothing new or unusual for me; it didn't bother me.
I was just there in person. And then they were looking for a
minister, a man, and I helped to find a minister and a man,
and he stayed a while, and when he came I decided that since
I was doing what I was doing, he was the director rind I became, I think, co-director. And then there was nobody, and
of course there was no money in those days, so I kept on
until the summer of 1960. And prior to that, of course, the
sit-ins had started, and I was able to get the SCLC to at least
sponsor the conference in Raleigh. We had hoped to call
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IN GOVf:ltNMl,NT SEllVICE ANI) l'Ol.I'I'ICAL
Lin:
t:ogdhcr :thout 1 0 0 or 125 of tlte young leaders who had
. emerged in the sit-ins .in the South. Uut of course the sit-ins
had been so dynamic in the .field that when we got to the
· ri1eeting we had two hundred and some people, including
some from the North. And out of that conference of the
Easter weekend of 19Go, which I coordinated and organized,
we had a committee that came out of it, and out of that
committee SNCC was born.
And after SNCC carne into existence, of course, it opened
up a new era of struggle. I felt the urge to stay close by.
~ecause if I had done anything anywhere, it had been largely
111 the role of supporting things, and in the backaround
of
0
things that needed to be done for the organizations that were
supposedly out front. So I felt if I had done it for the elders
'
I could do it for young people.
J had no difficulty relating to the young people. I spoke
their language in terms of the meaning of what they had to
say. I didn't change my speech pattern and they didn't have
to change their speech pattern. But we were able to communicate.
I never had any income or paid relationship with SNCC.
In order to be available to do things with SNCC, I first found
a two-year project with the Southern Region of the National
Student '(WCA in a special Human Relations Program.
1l1en I took up a relationship with the Southern Conference
Educational Fund ( SCEF). I still am on their staff in a
consultative role, and I stayed in Atlanta until the summer
of '64, spring and summer of '64. I was asked to come up
and help ~rganize the challenge of the Mississippi Freedom
Democratic Party at the Democratic Convention. So offices
were set up in Washington and I functioned there until
after the convention, closed up the office, and then moved
back to New York from Atlanta.
There arc those, some of the young· people especially, who
have said to me that if I had not been a woman I would
have been well known in certain places, and perhaps held
certain kinds of positions.
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IN GOVEHNI\I.t::N'I' SJo:llVlCE AND \'OLI'J'lt:AL t.H•· ~t
I lt;tvt: 11lways ft:lt it wu~ tt k111cii c:tp for opprc~sed peoples
to depend so largely upon a leader, because unfortunatdy in
our culture, the charismatic leader usually becomes a leader
because he has found a spot in the public limelight. It usu~lly
means he has been touted through the public media, which
means tha~ the media made him, and the media may undo
him. There is also the danger in our culture that, because a
person is called upon to give public statements and is acclaimed by the est:~blishmcnt, such a person gets to the point
of believing that he is the movement. Such people get so
involved with playing the game of being important that they
exhaust themselves and their time, and they don't do the
work of actually organizing people.
For myself, circumstances hequently dictated what had to
be done as I saw it. For example, I had no plans to go down
and set up the office of SCLC. But it seemed unless some. thing were done whatever impetus had been gained would
be lost, and nobody else was available who was willing or
able to do it. So I went because to me it was more important
to see what was a potential for all of us than it was to do what
I migllt have done for myself. I knew from the beginning .
that as a woman, an older woman, in a group of ministers
who ar~ accustomed to having women largely as supporters,
there was no place for me to have come into a leadership
ro . The · competition wasn't worth it.
The movement of the ' o's and '6o's was carried Jar ely
by women, since it came out of c mrch grou·ps. It was sort of
second nature to women to Ia a su ortive role. How many
ma e a conscious decision on the basis of the larger goals,
how many on the basis of habit pattern, I don't know. Dut
it's true that the number of women who carried the movement is much larger than that of men. Black women have
had to carry this role, and I think the younger women are
insisting on an equal footing .
I don't advocate anybody following the pattern I followed,
unless they find themselves in a situation where they think
that the larger goals will be shortchanged if they don't. From
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IN GOVERNJ.\U:NT SERVICE AND POLITICAL LIFE
I lit: sl :llulpoinl or I he; hi st·orical p:ilh;rn of t·lw soc icl'y, whicll
seems to ;~ssutnc that litis is tile best role for women, I think
that certainly the young people who are challenging this
ought to be challenging it, and it ought to be changed. But
I also think you have to have a certain sense of your own
Vl\luc, und <i ~ cn s e of sceurity on yo11r part, to be able to
forgo the gbmor of what the leadership role offers. From
lite s1":111dpoint of my work and rny own self-concepts, I don't
lltink l have thought of myself largely as a WOJIWII. 1 thought
of myself as an individual with a certain amount of sense of
the need of people to participate in the movement. I have
always thought what is needed is the development of people
who nrc interested not in being leaders as much as in developing leadership among other people. Every time I see a young
person who has come through the system to a stage where
he could profit from the system and identify with it, but who
. identifies more with the struggle of black people who have
not had his ch:mce, every time I find such a person I take
new hope. I feel a new life ' as a result of it.
Ella Baker, taped interview with Gerda Lerner,
December 1970. Used by permission .